


Loneliness Longs for Company

by memoriesofrain



Category: Final Fantasy XIII Series, Final Fantasy XIII-2
Genre: Angst and Feels, Comfort, Crying, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Feels, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hope misses his family and friends, Hurt/Comfort, Loneliness, Platonic Relationships, Post-Death in the Family, Prompt Fic, Snow comforts Hope, Tumblr Ask Box Fic, Tumblr Prompt, no one visits Hope, unless they need something
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-24 03:24:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15621474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/memoriesofrain/pseuds/memoriesofrain
Summary: Sometimes it only takes a stray thought to break the dam holding in your emotions.





	Loneliness Longs for Company

**Author's Note:**

> I was sent a request by [artsyvana](http://artsyvana.tumblr.com/) on tumblr. Original prompt in the end notes!
> 
> I hope you like this!

Nobody visits Hope.

Well, no, that’s not entirely true he tells himself. People visit Hope when they want something, when they need him to do something. He hadn’t dwelt on it at first. He liked that people needed him, that they saw the value in him that he failed to see himself in the beginning after they were released from their crystal stasis.

When everyone left, it was then that he began to feel truly isolated. No one remembered him, too wrapped up in their own lives. He didn’t blame them of course, he was happy for them, he really was. But that loneliness gets to you after a while. Too many days spent in a row without a single glance from a familiar face. His father did the best he could, but he didn’t know how to handle Hope by that point, if he ever had. Hope had grown up too much and his father was stuck treating him as both a child and an adult, never knowing what the right approach was. So his father avoided him when he could.

It didn’t help that Hope shared most of his looks with his mother. He didn’t blame his father. He didn’t blame anyone.

He focused on work, on getting Academia into a fully functioning metropolis with the ever-looming fate of Cocoon falling dogging his every advance. His father passed away just ten years after the events of his focus was completed.

And that was it. He couldn’t even delude himself that anyone was waiting to see him. No one wanted to see him.

When he saw Serah, for a single moment he thought she was here to see him. They may not have known each other well, or at all really, but Hope was so desperate for contact, for someone to visit him because they wanted to. The moment was broken by her exclamation of shock.

She didn’t come to visit him. To check up on him. She didn’t even know he would be there. And she only came back when she needed more information on Lightning. He didn’t blame her though.

 

When he was in 4XX, he was revered, he was _the Director_ , important and someone to admire. People visited him all the time to have him look over their work, to answer their questions. But not to visit.

It was unnerving to him. He went from being despised to an unknown face and now to someone looked upon as one of the revolutionary thinkers of an era. He didn’t like to dwell on it and focused on his work like he always did. Tried not to think about the frequent visits he received from nameless faces while his supposed friends had never bothered to visit in the ten years he’d last seen them.

But eventually, everyone breaks.

It was something small that triggered the tight feeling in his chest. He was sitting in his office, writing out another report on the changes that needed to be made on the Arc when he’d glanced out his window. His office gave him a perfect view of Cocoon and the crystal base. He needed to take a trip down to say hello to Fang and Vanille. It’d been far too long and he wondered if they missed him as much as he missed them.

He missed Fang’s brashness, the way she took nothing but your best. He missed the way she’d ruffle his hair when he’d done well in battle. He missed her heavy accent and her one-armed hugs, the few that he’d received never seemed enough.

He missed Vanille’s soft nature, her upbeat personality even when things seemed bleak. He missed her playful pokes to get him to lighten up, the way they teased each other and laughed. He missed her hugs and the way she’d put random things on his head to amuse herself.

And then he looked at the date.

And in the bright text on his screen he could see the bold numbers telling him that it was the anniversary of his father’s death.

Dates were fickle things nowadays. He didn’t usually register days, instead thinking of another day being one day closer to Cocoon’s fall, one day less he had to work. But this number left him feeling particularly numb. Perhaps it was because he’d never gotten to mourn the death of his father before he’d made plans to be put to sleep until 4XX.

While he and his father had never been particularly close, there were definitely things about the man that Hope missed. He missed their awkward dinner conversations, from discussions about work to what Hope had gotten up to that day. He missed the stilted smiles he would sometimes see creep onto his face when he found something Hope had done to be endearing.

But he missed the way his father talked about his mother the most.

He never got tired of hearing his father tell stories about his mother. He’d tell stories about the day he met her, to tales about their dates, their marriage, the shenanigans of her pregnancy with him, the secrets she’d shared with his father about Hope as he grew up. It left both of them in somber moods when the story was through, oftentimes with his father casting him a bittersweet look before disappearing for potentially days, but it was worth it.

Any piece of his mother that he could still have, had always been worth it.

_And now he didn’t have any of it._

The realization made something crack inside him and he couldn’t stop the tears from gathering in his eyes and overflowing down his cheeks. He half-heartedly tried to brush them away, but more quickly took their place. Maybe this is why he never stopped to think about his situation.

Because he had nothing but _hope_ to keep him going and even that had grown ragged even with him painstakingly patching up his self-doubt.

He couldn’t stop the spiral of thoughts, of loss that had been dogging his footsteps since the moment his mother had fallen. Tears seemed to flow endlessly from his eyes and nothing would halt their descent. He begged himself to stop crying, to put a stop to it all and get back to work. Back to what he needed to do. But he couldn’t.

He blamed himself for that. Too weak to control himself. He wondered what the people of Academia would think of him now; the Director in such a state of disarray, a far cry from his usual put together self.

His door opened and he tried to scramble to hide the traces of his breakdown but he knew it was a lost cause.

“Hey Hope, Serah needed to talk to Noel about something so I figured I’d-“

Hope stared at Snow who stared right back. Snow’s grin slowly fell into a frown, eyebrows pulled together with concern.

“What happened?” Snow asked. He took a hesitant step into the room, just enough to close the door behind him. Hope must not have answered fast enough because Snow repeated himself, taking another two steps toward him.

Hope pulled his lower lip between his teeth and shook his head. “It’s nothing,” Hope said, “Don’t worry about it, Snow.” He put the best smile he could on his face. “What can I do for you?”

Snow opened and closed his mouth and Hope knew he hadn’t done a good enough job to convince Snow he was okay.

“Hope… you don’t have to…” Snow finally stood in front of him.

Silence stretched between them and Hope searched for a way to fix the situation. He had done such a good job at putting his emotions off to deal with later and suddenly all that effort was for naught.

Suddenly he was being pulled against a warm body, two arms wrapping around him, cocooning him from the rest of the world.

“You don’t have to talk,” Snow said softly, like one would to a startled animal. “Just know I’m here if you want to talk about it. But for now, if you need to cry you can. I’m not gonna say anything about it.”

That was all it took for Hope to break again, but it was softer this time. He fisted his hands into the fabric of Snow’s jacket and let his tears fall, undoubtedly leaving a wet spot against Snow’s clothes, but the other man didn’t seem to care. He felt Snow rub circles against his back, like he’d done when he was younger and doubting himself on their focus.

Hope didn’t know how long they stayed like that, but he didn’t really care. He was safe here. Yes it hurt, yes it didn’t change all of the loss he’d gone through, but even so, he felt comforted. He felt-

“Hope?”

He shifted his head just enough to be able to see Snow. He must’ve looked like such a mess, but Snow was still giving him such a warm smile.

“It’s good to see you, I’ve missed you.”

Finally, after so long of being alone and brushed aside for more important endeavors, someone had visited Hope.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! If you have the time, I would really appreciate it if you'd leave a comment or even just a kudo. You can tell me what you liked or didn't like :)
> 
> If you want to read more of my writing, please check out [cakelanguage](http://cakelanguage.tumblr.com/) on tumblr
> 
> Original prompt:  
> Can you please do a Final Fantasy 13-2 fanfic where Snow finds Hope alone, grieving for his parents and Fang and Vanille, and then goes to comfort him? And can you please make it NO slash and ONLY platonic?


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